Sunday, October 26, 2014

Michael Mann's UCLA Schtick

At the "UCLA Hammer Forum on Climate Change" held this past week, which I was unfortunate to attend, the only speakers were warmists Michael Mann and UCS scientist Brenda Ekwurzel. I previously covered the litany of misrepresentations of UCS chief of climate science education Dr. Ekwurzel, and now provide my written notes on the misrepresentations in Dr. Mann's presentation and his answers to written questions from the audience carefully selected by the moderator. I shot one photo of the audience of mostly aging-hippie-types, before being told photos, video, and audio recording were prohibited. About 150 people attended the public event, but at least 25% of the seats in the theater were empty. The lady who sat down next to me immediately said "if there are any climate deniers here, I'm going to smack them," and then proceeded to sleep through most of the event. I was surprised that there were so few Generation-Y college-age attendees at the UCLA Hammer Museum, apparently not too much concern about the whole "inter-generational justice" climate change thing Mann discussed.

Started presentation claiming the evidence for AGW is "straightforward and not controversial."

Said CO2 levels have not been as high as today for "several million years" [debunked]

Said climate change we are allegedly experiencing now is "dangerous" and we will soon be inhabiting a "different planet"

Said with "business as usual" there will be 4-5C warming by 2100, and 8-10C warming in the Arctic [debunked]

Said use of polar bears as the "poster child" for AGW was a "mistake" because it gave the "false impression that climate change is a distant thing" despite it allegedly happening "everywhere"

Said he doesn't have to convince the people in the audience from Southern California that climate change is real: "just look at the historic drought" [debunked]

Claimed flooding from Florida king tides (which are controlled by gravitation from the Moon and Sun and have occurred for millennia) "used to happen only once a year," but allegedly due to AGW, "will happen once a month."

Said due to climate change, the surge from Sandy was 13 feet instead of 12 feet and that this caused flooding of an extra 25 miles inland [debunked]

Discussed his Scientific American article on 2036 doomsday scenario [debunked]

Said "California drought was made worse" by climate change, and is "the worst ever seen" [debunked]

Said Senator Inhofe, Heartland Institute, Republicans in general, and "climate deniers" are all allegedly funded by the Koch brothers.

Said Inhofe was scheduled to give a speech at a Heartland meeting, but had to cancel because he was ill from swimming in a lake with an algal bloom due to "unprecedented heat in Oklahoma" (implying that was man-made)

Showed his thoroughly debunked hockey stick [containing 'Mike's trick to hide the decline'] and called it an "icon" of the IPCC that is now part of a "veritable hockey league" of other "hockey sticks" since "every study says recent temperatures are unprecedented." [debunked]

Said you don't even need his hockey stick to know that AGW is real because of the greenhouse effect described [incorrectly] by Arrhenius in 1896.

Says the Republicans get their climate science from a journal...(long pause)..."The Wall Street Journal"

Said Republicans are "the party of anti-science"

Said the only debate Congress should be having is "how to deal with this problem, and not pretend the problem doesn't exist"

Showed the picture of his daughter at an aquarium with a polar bear diving for a fish behind her, as Anthony has already commented upon. Using this picture as a prop, said AGW is a problem of "intergenerational ethics" and that he didn't want his daughter to one day have to tell her kids that "polar bears used to exist, but we damaged their home."

With that tear-jerker of an ending, Mann finished his presentation.

Additional notes on Mann's responses to written questions from the audience (which were first carefully filtered by the moderator):

Said "scientists are the most conservative people on the planet" and that "science has self-correcting machinery." Said that if a scientist commits fraud or makes a mistake, "you'll be found out" by other scientists, and that one "gets ahead in science by proving other people wrong" [conveniently failing to mention that Mann himself is potentially the most "caught out" scientist in history, by McIntyre & McKitrick, Wegman and the NAS, Richard Mueller, John Christy, and many others].

Said that "for thousands of scientists to conspire and the oceans and atmosphere to play along" would be necessary for AGW to be a "hoax"

Said climate skeptics "are not real skeptics," they are just "denialists"

Said the IPCC claims "are as certain as science can be about anything"

Said "in many ways, China and India are ahead of us on fighting climate change"

Said there's no reason why renewables can't replace fossil fuels

Said Koch brothers are funding ALEC and the "campaign of denial"

Said North Carolina is trying to "outlaw Teslas"

Said CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere is "centuries" and that even if man-made emissions completely stopped now, warming would continue for "centuries" [debunked]

Said CO2 emissions must be reduced 5-10% per year starting now, that he said that many years ago, "but I'm really serious this time!" [accompanied by Cheshire smile]

Said Exxon is planning for a carbon tax of $60/ton, meanwhile "funding the disinformation campaign"

In answer to audience question, "Can capitalism be defeated to stop the destruction of the natural world?" [which received applause from the UCLA aging-hippie-commie audience], Mann said it was the other speaker's turn to answer.

Said there are 5 times more fossil fuels available than necessary to warm the planet by 2C, which if all were burned, would allegedly warm the planet 10-14C

Said "we are already seeing dangerous climate change"

Following the presentations and questions, the fake-Nobelist went to the lobby for book signings [the back cover of which says he shared the Nobel Peace Prize], guarded by 3 heavily-armed UCLA police officers nearby [I've attended many other events in this same theater and never seen any UCLA police officers at any other events].

The great Mann smiling for a fan

Perhaps 20-25 attendees bought Mann's book for signing .

I asked if I could stand in the line to ask Dr. Mann a question without having to buy his book first, and was told no.

On the way to the theater parking lot, I noticed the bicycle rack was empty, and the anti-capitalism and anti-fossil fuel attendees driving off in their fossil-fueled vehicles.

8 comments:

Excellent review! There is of course a reason why the questions are carefully screened, as our dear friend Mann knows full well that if he was asked to cite a single instance where any prominent skeptic scientist or skeptic speaker has denied the existence of climate change or global warming overall, he could not do so. Nor could he answer a question of whether he could cite any instance of physical proof being offered to support the assertion that illicit money was paid to skeptic climate scientists under a directive to lie and mislead. In the face of those twin wipeouts, Mann would start to lose portions of the audience the moment those people start to discover he has no excuse for dismissing all of the questions skeptics would pose about the contradictions in his 'science' assertions.

Russel, you're not quite accurate. While most 'skeptic' scientists do believe in actual climate change (since climate is always changing) most of them do not believe the Earth is still warming, since it isn't. What warming there was ended about 17 years ago. Since then the overall trend has been cooler. Also, while making mention of the Koch brothers riles up his crowd, they love Soros and the other billionaires who fund quacks like this because most of these people are flat out socialists. There's no getting around it. While they'd say that's crazy talk and they love America, get them into a political conversation and the proof is there for anyone to see. They don't just love socialist policies, they want the U.S. to be like France, Venezuela, etc.

Yes, Mann spent about half of his alloted time at UCLA slandering Republicans, Koch brothers, "climate deniers," etc., and the other half of his time on junk science propaganda. This "forum" was pure political propaganda, and not "scientific" by any means.

The grand illusion of global warming continues. Someone should ask him why global temperatures have stopped warming for 17 years. He also denies the existence of the Medieval warm period. At one of his talks, I asked him about a paper reporting that found evidence of the Medieval warming in Antarctica. His answer was that the author had recanted his finding. Not true and just another lie. He then cut off the questions and left. The warnings of disasters by he and others are based on the invalid climate models.

The scientists studied ikaite crystals from sediment cores drilled off the coast of Antarctica. The sediment layers were deposited over 2,000 years. The scientists were particularly interested in crystals found in layers deposited during the “Little Ice Age,” approximately 300 to 500 years ago, and during the “Medieval Warm Period,” approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago. Both climate events have been documented in Northern Europe, but studies have been inconclusive as to whether the conditions in Northern Europe extended to Antarctica.

“We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica,” Lu says. “More importantly, we are extremely happy to figure out how to get a climate signal out of this peculiar mineral. A new proxy is always welcome when studying past climate changes.” http://asnews.syr.edu/newsevents_2012/releases/ikaite_crystals_climate.html